Mapping DoD Micro Markets for Autonomy

The key strategic implication is that winning in defense looks less like capturing a giant top down budget and more like stitching together many narrow buying lanes that each have their own gatekeepers, contract habits, and funding pools. In practice, one program office may want a quick pilot, another may prefer a standard commercial contract, and another may need a multiyear program path, so companies that map those lanes early can keep revenue compounding instead of waiting on one make or break award.

• This is why Forterra frames the valley of death as avoidable. The company is selling one autonomy stack across multiple buyers and missions, then using those parallel deployments to build volume and credibility. Forterra expected to deploy more than 200 systems in 2025, which shows how spreading across buyers can create production scale before a single flagship program lands.
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• The same pattern shows up in Scott Sanders' earlier Anduril playbook. Two program managers in the same building can use different acquisition strategies and different colors of money, so defense companies need a bottoms up map of specific program offices, budget lines, and contract pathways, not a slide claiming access to the full DoD budget.
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• This shapes product strategy as much as sales strategy. A narrowly scoped defense product can hit a small budget pocket and stall, which is why both Forterra and Anduril emphasize either multi product expansion or dual use, where the same core system can be sold into adjacent defense buyers or commercial customers like yards, terminals, and logistics sites.
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Going forward, the winners in defense autonomy will be the companies that treat procurement knowledge as part of the product. The advantage will come from building technology that fits several mission budgets at once, then packaging it in the contract form each office is ready to buy, which turns a fragmented market into a repeatable scaling engine.